The multiple back to back LLM calls are done on accumulating context, so if there is a sampling error it could throw the entire session out of whack, because LLM's build on the previous context.
It's actually meaningless to argue, one could simply sample more than 1 times and let the numbers speak for themselves.
I don't disagree that multiple tests increase confidence, but it's not correct to argue that an agent in a loop harness is equivalent to oneshotting
I don’t think single agent loops are good enough.
This is a different thing. Yes, giving multiple example is called "few-shot prompting".
But one-shot vs few-shot benchmarking is different. In this context "one-shot" means "pass at 1 effort" as opposed to "multi-shot". In the literature this is called "pass@k".
Anthropic has a good explanation here: https://www.anthropic.com/engineering/demystifying-evals-for... (search for "pass@k").
In this discussion we are discussing pass@1 (single shot) vs pass@(k>1) (multi shot).
> The multiple back to back LLM calls are done on accumulating context, so if there is a sampling error it could throw the entire session out of whack, because LLM's build on the previous context.
This isn't really true. In an agentic loop the LLM can correct itself via in-context learning.